Below is an excerpt from the China Media Monitor, a weekly newsletter that covers the Chinese media business in depth.
Victor Koo, founder and CEO of Youku.com, recently spoke to China Media Monitor about his plans for syndicating professional content from TV producers. You can read an excerpt from the full interview published in the China Media Monitor below.
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Late last year, you announced that Youku had formed partnerships with more than 100 broadcasters and content producers by the start of the fourth quarter. Why did you decide to launch this cooperation? How will this cooperation model generate revenues?
First of all, let me provide some background. Youku does not see itself as a video-sharing website. We just think of ourselves as the number one online video website in China.
From the very start, we analyzed the online video environment in China and we recognized the fact that is very different from the US. We don’t view ourselves as just some sort of Chinese language Youtube. Around 70% of our content is professional and 30% is semi-professional or amateur.
The history of home DV is a lot shorter in China than the US, where programs like America’s Funniest Home Videos have run for a long time. When Youtube came out in the US, they were dealing with an environment where a lot of people already knew how to create their own videos. So there was a lot more content and it was arguably more interesting.
Another thing that makes China different from the US is that the traditional media industry is highly fragmented. In China, you have around 298 TV broadcasters with thousands of stations and thousands of TV and film production companies.
So Youku worked towards syndicating a lot of this content from day one by actively working with TV stations and production companies. We announced our initiative in the early part of 2008, when we already had more than 100 partners such as Beijing TV and Shanghai Media Group. By the end of 2008, we announced our plans to syndicate TV drama series and news content.
There is an enormous amount of pirated material online in China. How do you work to curb the volume of pirated content on Youku? How can you do this and still maintain your popularity?
Let’s clarify that, western dramas are actually not that popular on Chinese video sites. Chinese language TV dramas take most of the market share, including dramas from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Korean TV dramas are the only foreign formats that do well on Chinese video-sharing sites. There is not a lot of European or American content.
We’ve been developing video matching technology for a long time. Back when we launched in 2007, we publicly stated that our content strategy is mainstream and clean, or “healthy”. We said that despite the fact that 2007 was the time when people were fighting for eyeballs. It was a risky move but we said we wanted to stick to this strategy because we wanted to be able to monetize our content going down the road.
So we developed matching and screening technology back in 2007. We now have more than 10 million videos in our database. As content comes in, it is matched against all the content that has been uploaded to our website in the past. You can imagine how much stuff has been uploaded to our site, there’s almost always a match there. If the new material matches content that was previously screened out, like inappropriate or pirated content, it is weeded out very quickly. If the material has been approved before, it gets approved again.
We also have a team of people screening our content 24/7. The technology helps us categorize the content into different levels of sensitivity. We also screen content that doesn’t have a match. The team has been in place since 2007, when it was quite small.